


Autumn's Ghosts

by V_V_lala



Category: Autumn's Here - Hawksley Workman (Song), Original Work
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Family History, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Multi, Past Character Death, War Aftermath
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-03
Updated: 2015-06-03
Packaged: 2018-04-02 15:58:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4065925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/V_V_lala/pseuds/V_V_lala
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“So you know how dreadful the autumns are. If last year was no indication.”</i>
</p><p>  <i>“I know. Though my dad says it hadn’t always been like this. Only since the war.”</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Autumn's Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Deepdarkwaters](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/gifts).



The autumn air always smells like rain to Adrian. Rain and wet hay, the far off twang of pine needles breaking through sometimes when driving on the backroads. The smells of his childhood were what overwhelmed him the first days back. Not the people or the sights, the quaint high school and beloved baseball pitch or the windmills in the distance. Not even the constant haze that hung over the town in the early mornings, covering everything in a sleepy mist – God knows how anyone ever got up for work in the morning. What really got to him were the smells. 

Adrian thinks they were the real reason he left – they were the most pervasive part of this place. There is nothing quite like it in the city. And yet, it has been a year since his father died, and though the reason for his return is gone, he somehow cannot bring himself to leave. The latest excuse is trying to sell the house. The market is poor, sure, but he is also a picky seller. The house he grew up in could not possibly go to any random somebody. It is ridiculous, really though, and he knows it. 

Sometimes it seems like all of Adrian’s demon, or the closest he has to such, are all here, hiding in the bales of hay and skittering through the far-off outlines of pine trees, like so many memories, just out of reach but always there. 

Strange how much his father’s melancholy had effected him. Adrian supposes his childhood was completely normal. He never knew his mother, who died in childbirth – or so was the official story – but aside from that he had probably been the most adored child in the country. 

But he could never quite get away from the feelings that something was never quite right: the sheets of rain even in early September, His father’s face framed against the embers in the fireplace and the half-empty bottle of whisky on the table. Always on the same date, every year. His father who, otherwise, drank very little if at all. He never explained, always deflected any questions, but Adrian always suspected, even before he found the letters. 

He had been snooping. He never should have found them, or the ones from his mother. Or the locket. Or the old officer’s cap. 

_“Your mother and uncle, they looked so much alike. You look so much like them. I loved them both.”_ That was the closest his father had ever gotten to a confession. And Adrian had been sixteen by them and old enough to have figured it out on his own. Especially after finding the letters. 

Adrian wonders if it is something in the air here, a curse of sorts, that makes the men in his family die young. His grandfather had died when his father was still in school. Adrian was only thirty and his own father was gone. Sometimes he imagines that he himself will not live to see his children graduate college. It is a gruesome thought, he knows, and completely unwarranted. But it niggles at him regardless. 

 

In the autumn, the evenings come quickly, eating up the daylight like a swarm of locusts might devour a year’s worth of crop. By the time Adrian gets home, the sun has almost set, though it is hard to tell with all the clouds. 

The house smells like Marie’s cooking. He breathes in the sweetness of that smell and wanders into the kitchen, wrapping his arms around his wife’s waist from behind. She hums quietly, unsurprised. 

“If you want to go down to the memorial, we should go now. Before it’s dark.” 

“It’s chilly out there. I hate to drag you out into the cold when it’s so warm here. And smells good.” 

She laughs, a little sadly and turns in his arms. “I want to go. I grew up here too, remember?” 

“So you know how dreadful the autumns are. If last year was no indication.” 

Something in her expression falls and softens at the same time. “I know. Though my dad says it hadn’t always been like this. Only since the war.”

“Get your coat then.” She goes to find it. 

Adrian leans against the counter and thinks. They were both from the same town, but only met as adults in the city by a strange coincidence. Marie’s family had moved to the city when she was nine and Adrian had been homeschooled up to the fifth grade. So it wasn’t really a wonder than they had not known anything of one another. Meeting each other later, in college, well… Adrian feels he can leave a lot of things to coincidence. But maybe not this one. Not with the way their family histories went. 

 

In the quiet, small cemetery, the war memorial is the most outstanding thing. Made out of marble, with names and dates carved into the stone and flowers brought regularly by the locals, it is the closest the town could get to a tourist attraction 

Adrian stands silently with Marie by his side. They hold hands. This is a ritual he had done every year of his life since he could remember. Every year of being here, at least. This silent, respectful, introspective duty that his father had held true to. When he was younger, he would go in uniform even. Adrian had almost liked the solemnness of this tradition, until he was old enough to understand it. To understand what it did to his father. 

How ironic is it, to survive the war but die of heartbreak years later? 

The official cause of death is listed as a heart attack, arising out of complication from pneumonia. Or something like that. But Adrian knows the truth. He’d known since he’d found the letters. 

Marie is the first one to speak. “My dad was the one who insisted we move to the city.” 

Adrian looks up, distractedly. “Oh?” 

“He could no longer stand my mom’s...he said it was unhealthy.”

“Did she lose someone in the war?”

“Her boyfriend. Or fiancé—whatever you want to call it. He promised her they would get married after he came back. The old railroad, the one that’s out of use? Supply trains were going through it almost every day back then. Supply trains, trains carrying soldiers to Fort Fontaine… She saw him off there and then—well, he came back once for leave but then the second time, six months later the letter came. Her fiancé, he’d gone MIA and well…soon after they finally listed him as presumed dead. But my mom, stubborn as she is, she would always go down to the station and watch the trains come in. Exactly once a month, because that’s when the new recruits left and the soldiers on leave would come back. She only stopped going after marrying my dad.” 

“I didn’t know.” Adrian gives Marie’s hand a squeeze. “What…what was his name?” He waits, expectantly, overcoming her confusion with a questioning look. 

“Bobby, I think. It might have been Robert – his full name – but she only ever called him Bobby.” 

Adrian nods and looks away. He supposes he should feel angry, if only on his father’s behalf. 

“Mom stopped going after her wedding for a bit,” Marie continues. “But then she picked it up again. Although, it wasn’t very often. But I have these memories… Grey autumn days, the roads thick with mud, especially the back roads – they hadn’t paved them yet back then. Mom would put a sweater and knitted hat on me and tell Dad we were going to the market or to the park. But instead we’d walk down to the train station. By then it was completely abandoned. The trains never came anymore. But she’d always sit there on the bench while I played in the puddles. She would just…sit there with her face very still. I never saw her this still except for those moments. I think Dad found out – he must have. I think he liked it here.” 

“He did the right thing,” Adrian says flatly. “Otherwise, she might have died of it. Like my dad.”

Marie looks over sharply, and Adrian can feel the consternation coming off of her. “Your dad died of a heart attack, Adrian. This was not your fault. You have to stop blaming yourself—“ 

“I’m no…” He laughs, bitterly. “You’re right, I am. I ran away from here. From all his memories and regrets. Then I married you…” 

Her eyebrows knit together. “I know your dad and mine didn’t like each other much but—“ 

“It’s not your dad. It’s your mother.”

“My mother?” 

For a long time Adrian does not answer. He studies the unyielding marble of the war memorial, picking out the names. Saying them in his head. Until he comes to it: _Adrian Kerns._ He’d never spoken of the letters before, or the rest of the story which he’d been able to piece together. But maybe it is time he told someone. Who else if not his wife?

“My Uncle Adrian, he volunteered to fight. It was not at all like him – war and everything. But he volunteered. What no one ever talks about is why. He loved this girl. He wanted to marry her and would have fought the world for her. But she had a boyfriend. Then that boyfriend went off to war and she was all alone. She was lonely and upset that he had cared about fighting more than about her. So she came to my uncle and…well they had something of a fling. But then the girl’s boyfriend came back on leave one time and while he was back, asked her to marry him. She agreed and broke things off with my uncle.”

It was strange telling this story. Adrian could feel the wrongness of it, the way other people’s secrets and tragedies were flowing through him, understanding how he had absorbed them. He had always been a little too sensitive, it seems. “So Uncle Adrian, he… I don’t know if he was looking for a bullet, or trying to prove something to this girl, but he volunteered for the war. My father saw no reason to stay around after that, so he joined the fighting as well. He and my mother were close by then. I suppose they spent a night together before he left because Mom was pregnant when…when my uncle died. And then Dad could not come home on leave and she was here alone… Everyone says she died in childbirth but I think… I think she killed herself. I don’t know anything for sure, but I think that’s what my dad thought… He never forgave himself for it.” 

Marie, who is now looking at him with eyes wide, says in nearly a whisper, “The girl he loved…was she…?”

“Your mother.”

“My god!” Marie covers her face with her hands and lets out a long, pained sigh. “So your father faulted my mother for his best friend’s death and then for…everything that followed?” 

“Yes.” Adrian shrugs, putting one arm around Marie’s waist and pulling her close. The sun has set and the tombstones in the graveyard now loom like dark voids. Each of them a black hole of sorts. “Only…Uncle Adrien was more than just his friend. He—Dad…my father was in love with him.” 

Marie tilts her head back so she can look into his face. “What about your mother?”

_Your mother and uncle, they looked so much alike. I loved them both._

__Adrian shivers, and pretends it is the cold, wet air. “I think he loved her too, in a way. Dad was childhood friends with the Kerns siblings… And they looked so much alike.” The words sound echoing to him, vacant somehow. “But maybe Mom knew, or felt it? Maybe that’s just another thing Dad could never forgive himself for.”

“How do you know all of this anyway?” 

“I found some letters. I wasn’t looking for them, I was just being nosy and…” He swallows. 

“Adrian,” Marie says softly, turning in his arms and wrapping her arms around his neck. “I’m not my mother—“

“I know!—“

“And you didn’t fail your father in any way. His regrets were his own. You and I are not my mother and your uncle. Maybe he couldn’t help but see it that way, but it’s not true.”

“I know.” He leans in and kisses her, softly. “I love you.”

“I love you.” 

“We’ll sell the house and then we’ll leave. We should leave, Marie. I know I’ve been saying that a lot but…I think it’s time. I can never be myself here. I always feel like I’m just a shadow, a reminder of someone else. Just wet hay that was once green grass.” 

She nods, a little vehemently. “We’ll leave. Before Christmas. I’ll hold you to it.” 

He takes her hand and they begin the track back home. At the corner, Adrian turns and gives the war memorial one last look. He imagines Marie’s mother, waiting at the empty train station year after year for a train that will never come. He can see the slight slump emerging in his father’s shoulders, even in uniform, as the years go by. Flowers for the war memorial, flowers for Adrian’s mother’s grave. And ever year, on the same day, a half-empty bottle of whisky, as though to commemorate the start of the rainy season. He can even almost imagine what his uncle must have looked like in his uniform, standing on the train platform, blind to the pining looks thrown his way by his best friend, constantly scanning the crowd for a girl who will not come to see him off. And for the first time, Adrian can imagine his mother, with a glass of red wine in one hand and a Xanax bottle in the other, postpartum depression adding the final drop to the glass already overflowing with grief. From her brother’s death, her lover’s absence, and, perhaps, the knowledge that the man she loves loved her brother more. 

 

It begins to rain just as Adrian and Marie make it to the house. The wind had kicked up clouds of dry leaves, a precursor to the storm. They cover the porch, a patchwork of reds, oranges, yellows and browns. Just a memory of the fresh, green things they had once been. 

The autumn rain pours down, drenches them, washes them away. Until there is nothing left of that life. 

Autumn is back, but Adrian is ready to run from it this time. And this time, there will be nothing left to make him look back.


End file.
